Americans have a reputation for being cockeyed optimists, but we're suckers when it comes to "declension narratives" about the fallen state of our world.

John Samples is a political scientist, vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, and a member of Facebook's Oversight Board, which recently upheld Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump. He tells Nick Gillespie how the group came to its conclusions and why he thinks the Oversight Board is an excellent example of private-sector governance of cyberspace. He also discusses his 2019 policy analysis "Why the Government Should Not Regulate Content Moderation of Social Media."

The Columbia linguist discusses his new book Nine Nasty Words and dismisses the ideological excesses of the 'anti-racism' movement.

Goodbye Guns N' Rose: The Crime, Beauty, and Amplified Chaos of America's Most Polarizing Band, by Art Tavana, is an extended essay on the cultural legacy not just of a band but of a period that informs contemporary debates on politics and culture even as it recedes from our memory. Tavana, an LA-based former writer for Playboy and LA Weekly, talks with Nick Gillespie about the attraction of popular nihilism; Axl Rose as the dispossessed son of middle America; how the band's racist, xenophobic, and homophobic song "One in a Million" reflected national anxiety over coming political, social, and economic change; how the group's beef with Nirvana, another band that couldn't quite make it into the post-Cold War era, illustrates the limits of rock and roll; and what comes after the end of corporate mass culture.

Meet Jane Coaston, the new host of The New York Times podcast The Argument. She's a registered Libertarian who is "especially distrustful of efforts by the state to get people to do things." She explains that "at some point, a regulation or a law with the absolute best of intentions will be wielded by people who may not have the absolute best of intentions."

Coaston tells Nick Gillespie that growing up in a liberal household in a conservative part of the country made her concerned about giving authorities a lot of power. Adding to that was a sense of being isolated because of her race and sexuality. "My libertarian sensibilities really came from a sense of, I know what it is like politically to always lose and to see what the winners look like," she says.

In The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, Jesse Singal looks at attempts to change social policy based on bad or faulty psychological research--think power posing, the self-esteem movement, and the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which supposedly reveals unconscious racism. He tells Nick Gillespie his goal is to explain why we keep falling for ideas that psychologists say will fix society so we waste less time focusing on things that don't really help anyone.

Chef Andrew Gruel just might be the patron saint of restaurateurs, small-business owners, and service workers during the pandemic. He's the founder and owner of Slapfish, a growing national fast-casual restaurant chain based in Huntington Beach, California. He's a widely recognized culinary innovator and familiar face on  the Food Network and other cooking channels. He's also an unabashed critic of arbitrary rules that put business owners like him at the beck and call of hypocritical  politicians such as Gov. Gavin Newsom. Most famously, in an absolutely inspired rant that went viral on social media last December, Gruel listed all the ways in which California's ban on outdoor dining made no scientific or economic sense before concluding, "I'm not an asshole. The governor is."

Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with Gruel about what it's been like to run a business with government at all levels arbitrarily flipping the on-off switch, why innovation is central to both capitalism and cuisine, and why he'll never open another franchise in California.

After nearly 3 million deaths worldwide (and almost 600,000 in the United States), it looks like the end of the Covid-19 pandemic may be within site as vaccines proliferate. In "The Last Pandemic," the cover story of the new issue of Reason, Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues that technological breakthroughs and policy progress mean humanity may never again have to endure such as disaster. He tells Nick Gillespie that while scientists and medical researchers rose to the occasion, governments and bureaucrats remain a sticking point in dealing with the next pandemic.

Singapore-born journalist and activist Melissa Chen Chen talks with Nick Gillespie about how an obsessive focus on identity politics led the media to keep insisting without evidence that the murder of massage parlor workers in Atlanta was a hate crime against Asian Americans; why Hollywood is changing its products to please censors in the Chinese government; and how the best way to counter radicalization is with speech and information rather than repression.

Has anyone lived a more interesting, influential, and inspiring life than Stewart Brand? Born in 1938 and educated at Stanford...